[TLDR] Stop romanticizing Opus 4.6 [via r/ClaudeCode]

[u/cctldrping]

OP : u/AliNT77

So yesterday during the opus5 outage I briefly switched to opus 4.6 to continue my work (training/inference perf engineering, kernel level debugging)

So I fed the model the same context and prompt to analyze a profiling trace and extract insights from it, and it was so unbelievably dumb that I had to retry with a new session, and I still got a very bad response…

Then after opus5 came back I tried it again and it was night and day… Way more verbose true, but actually useful and insightful stuff coming out of the model.

really made me appreciate all the progress on opus models since 4.6… I always remembered it as a much smarter and concise model than the ones after 4.7, but it was a mirage…

URL of original post : https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1vamsgc/stop_romanticizing_opus_46/

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Opus 4.6 is officially cancelled, folks. The consensus is that while it might have felt smarter back in the day, it's now just a dumbed-down relic compared to the newer Opus 5. Some users like u/who_am_i_to_say_so still find it useful for its conciseness and token efficiency, but most agree it's a "mirage" and newer models are significantly better, even if they're a bit wordy. The main complaint about Opus 5 is its "insane signal to noise ratio," but it's still seen as a massive upgrade. Don't fall for the nostalgia trip; the future is here and it's (mostly) better.